The IPCC reports are all based upon emissions scenarios, which are, in turn, based upon economics. Now according to Timmy, that's all about to change.

The next IPCC report will be based upon the updates to the SRES. Great, that’s fine. But note how they’re updating the SRES. They’re not starting with the economics. Ooooooh no, that would be far too sensible. What they’ve actually done is made up some emissions levels.

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The SRES scenarios were not exactly "based on economics". They started with an exogenous projection of population, and an exogenous projection of per capita income, for each scenario. That already was problematic: the projected levels of per capita income were often incompatible (in the light of past experience) with the levels of fertility and population growth separately projected. Also, those increases in per capita income, plus those rates of population growth, implied (in several scenarios) rates of GDP growth well above historical experience. Once pop and income were already assumed, they assumed an "energy intensity of GDP" coefficient (energy consumed per million dollar of GDP), and an assumed level of emissions entailed by the use of all that energy. Many criticisms arose about the logic implicit in the projections.The new version is just a set of arbitrary trajectories for emissions, without any reference to the economic conditions that would originate such emissions. This avoids the tiresome discussions about internal consistency and about coherence with historical experience. In any case, the assumed scenarios are just that, scenarios, where each one is not supposed to be more probable or more realistic than the others. They are only used to project emissions under various hypotheses.Fed with those emissions, then, the climate models spit their projections about temperatures, precipitation, sea level rise and what not.

The die was cast when one of the most powerful men in the world, George Soros supported a 'scientist' James Hansen who's political fanaticism NASA regarded as a danger to its credibility. Hansen should have disappeared down the drain of history, he didn't, he invented AGW.

The rest of the story is like Forrest Gump on acid. The entire corporate world has fallen in step with a political simpleton who was quoted on Amazon endorsing a book by Keith Farnish calling for the destruction of industrial civilisation starting with acts of terrorism. Hansen also gave evidence on behalf of Greenpeace 'protesters' who caused £30,000 worth of damage, exactly what Farnish recommended.

7 Nov: Sydney Morning Herald: Peter Hannam: Former UN official says climate report will shock nations into actionTHE next United Nations climate report will ''scare the wits out of everyone'' and should provide the impetus needed for the world to finally sign an agreement to tackle global warming, the former head of the UN negotiations said.Yvo de Boer, the UN climate chief during the 2009 Copenhagen climate change talks, said his conversations with scientists working on the next report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggested the findings would be shocking."That report is going to scare the wits out of everyone,'' Mr de Boer said in the only scheduled interview of his visit to Australia. "I'm confident those scientific findings will create new political momentum.''...***Mr de Boer, who is now special global advisor on climate change for KPMG, said the best prospect may be for nations to settle on targets that they write into their national laws, rather than a binding international deal...http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/former-un-official-says-climate-report-will-shock-nations-into-action-20121106-28w5c.html

i have just commented on the previous "Without Limitations" thread re Pauline Neville-Jones and her BBC/FCO/CER/QinetiQ connections. the CER report i included is from this year, after Neville-Jones time as Advisory Board member between 2002-09:

June 2012: CER: Policy Brief: Saving emissions trading from irrelevanceby Stephen Tindale(Stephen Tindale is an associate fellow at the Centre for European Reform)As a first step, the cap on the volume of emissions should be lowered, to reflect the fact that the economic recession has led to lower emission levels than expected when the cap was set. A lower cap should be combined with a price floor and a price ceiling...http://www.cer.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/attachments/pdf/2012/pb_ets_29june12-5344.pdf

HM is right. The IPCC says (or said) that a scenario is a "...plausible description of how the future may develop based on a coherent and internally consistent set of assumptions about key relationships and driving forces on social and economic development, energy use..." (edited for clarity).

When the IPCC released the SRREN report (the Greenpeace one) for example, it found that reviewers refused to evaluate different scenarios with respect to their plausibility. For instance, even if it were very desirable, very few would agree that 80% of all energy could indeed be supplied by renewable energy sources. Others couldn't forsee a future with unmitigated expansion of fossil fuels. The solution was to just ditch the plausibility question and just compare scenarios, assuming they'd all come true given a chance.

Lo and behold, a world where 80% of the energy needed would come from 'renewable' sources was possible. Of course, it was possible. Once you throw logic out of the window, anything was possible.

The Greenpeace scenario is akin to the A1T scenario of the IPCC SRES, i.e., one where rapid unconstrained development of non-fossil fuel energy sources. Worstall is lamenting that such a scenario is not available for comparison this time around.

Once you understand the key fact, that scenario plausibility is *not* a component of any of the IPCC scenarios (or RCPs if you will), playing their game is not painful at all. The world can become steaming donkey bollocks or honeyed apple pie - depending on your imagination.

If you look at the source paper Worstall links to, the authors make it clear that they did not look at any of the A1 scenarios (those with low vulnerability) for the sake of "scenario parsimony". In other words, what the authors are saying is that they see no point in envisioning shitty and catastrophic worlds where humans are nevertheless in full control, presumably as it would defeat the purpose of releasing such reports.

What these people are doing is to adapt Hansenkoism for marketing purposes. You can't blame them. Unfortunately, people like Soros have marketed via captive politicians so the political process has now become part of that marketing.

There is only one way out, which is to create absolute standards of probity for scientists and politicians. For the former there must be a licensing path which imposes the same standards as say physicians. For the latter, the best route is limited tenure, say 11 years, the same as is done for detectives in the Police Force to stop them from becoming part of the Mafia.

Indeed, it would be very helpful if older people could be brought into Parliament to fill the gaps when idiots like the Milibands, Cameron, Clegg, Davey and Huhne were forced to stack shelves for a living, the jobs for which they are really suitable!.

Perhaps there is change in the air. I would never have believed that the IPCC would NOT be invited to COP18 at Doha, but blow me down, it's happened. http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/article.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=544308&version=1&template_id=36&parent_id=16 And there is the good Dr Pachauri spouting doom “Drought diminishes dietary diversity and reduces food consumption, causing an increased risk of mortality and diarrhoea." Now who'd have thought that climate change could lead to runny tummies? Scraping the bottom, perhaps?